The end-game in Libya is now being played out. Only Gaddafi himself and a few pockets of resistance by tribal loyalists remain. In chess, when defeat is inevitable, the losing player resigns. And so it is in war. Defeated leaders sue for terms. Only Hitler – unless we also count Saddam Hussein – was the exception to this. And now Gaddafi?

As late as December 1944, as the Anglo-American Allied Forces closed in on Berlin from the west with the Soviet Army advancing relentlessly from the east, Adolf Hitler told his military commanders: “Wars are finally decided by the recognition on one side or the other that the war can’t be won any more”. Yet, rather like Gaddafi today in Libya, he still fought on. Precisely when Hitler himself realised the game was up is unclear, and even after he had already decided to commit suicide a few months before final defeat, he still drove his forces on in a needless fight to the last. Germany paid a terrible price for such obduracy.

We may or may not be witnessing a similar end-game in Libya. Gaddafi has long sworn to fight to the last. Yet rumours are now rife that he may have made his escape to Zimbabwe, leaving behind tribally loyal troops to make a fanatical last stand in Sirte and Bani Walid. They could well prolong this bloody civil war by a few more weeks.

However long it takes, most observers are agreed that the end of the Gaddafi regime is nigh – whether he is eventually tried, killed or exiled. The Transitional National Council is establishing itself in Tripoli and has promised a rule-based democracy. Libyan assets, frozen by the west at the start of the rebellion, are being released to enable the country to begin the process of re-building. How should Malta prepare for the aftermath?

At the international and diplomatic level, the Prime Minister and the Foreign Affairs Minister have handled the crisis well. They have played a difficult hand with aplomb. The government has had a good war.

The same cannot be said for local politics, where the most pathetic tribal warfare à la Maltaise has again broken out over who was closer to Gaddafi, who took his money or awarded him the highest honours, and any number of stored up resentments of the kind bandied about in the school playground, aimed at making the Labour Party or the Nationalist Party when in government appear the more subservient of lackeys to a man Malta always recognised was deranged.

For pure Maltese navel-gazing, this latest spat took the biscuit. One columnist, who writes anonymously in The Sunday Times, even went so far as to try to settle internal, factional Nationalist Party scores by criticising some obscure statements made by Commissioner John Dalli at the start of the Libyan uprising.

Any objective assessment of Malta’s relationship with Gaddafi over the last 42 years must recognise the difficulties that successive governments – of whatever political hue – have had to face in dealing with this maverick on our doorstep. They have had to sup with the devil, and for the most part to use a very long spoon. It is always a matter of extremely fine judgement in playing the game of realpolitik to know how close or how far to get from a distasteful dictator like Gaddafi. The revelations emerging now of the closeness of the CIA in the United States and MI6 of the United Kingdom to Gaddafi’s intelligence service in the last few years are most embarrassing, but they are a good example of the lengths to which all nations go to protect and foster their own international, security and commercial interests in an uncertain world.

Throughout the last four decades, Malta was no different. With the benefit of hindsight, some of our governments sometimes got it right and sometimes got it wrong. But we should be in no doubt that they did it with Malta’s best international, diplomatic and commercial interests at heart, in the light of the circumstances at the time. So it must be in the future.

How does the government now build on success? The aftermath of the Gaddafi regime offers new challenges to Malta, as well as new opportunities. The uncertainties surrounding the kind of government which will emerge from the upheavals of a civil war in which tribal loyalties still abound and whose precise future political colour is still to reveal itself, mean that the road ahead may well be a rocky one.

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To take just one indicator. The selection last week of a former leader of a militant Islamic group to head Tripoli’s security forces has already raised fears that religious extremists could try to hijack the Libyan revolution. Many have already called for the imposition of sharia law under the new constitution. Some members of the Transitional National Council have expressed concern about the advance of Islamic extremism in Libya in the wake of the uprising.

The National Transitional Council, which Malta has already recognised, has a gargantuan task ahead of it in establishing a working government. The imposition of law and order in Tripoli itself, a capital of two million people that currently has no official police force and is divided among different militias and vigilante groups, presents a formidable task. Other towns and cities are similarly afflicted. Possible revenge killings loom, as well as tribal conflicts. Physical security to stave off anarchy and looting is vital. The establishment of the rule of law – a concept unknown under the tyrannical regime of Gaddafi, who dispensed justice as he saw fit – will take a long time, perhaps decades, to establish. The repair of the infrastructure – water, energy and, most importantly, oil production - to return the country to normality and a semblance of civilisation will take several months.

Above all, the NTC’s plans to establish new governance structures to replace the chaotic system of divide and rule which Gaddafi had introduced will take several years. Institution-building, as we have seen in Iraq, and still see so vividly in Afghanistan, takes time, as well as a culture change. It remains an open question whether Libya, with its clans and tribes – and the elephant in the room of Islamic fundamentalism - is capable of making the leap to some form of democracy, as promised by the Transitional National Council. We must hope that it will be able to avoid an Iraqi-style insurgency, as well as disputes among the new rulers.

For Malta, the challenge of dealing with our Libyan neighbour continues as it always has done. It is in Malta’s vital self-interest to continue to foster good relations. The government must continue to play its limited hand carefully. It must offer every humanitarian assistance that it can. It has an opportunity to offer advice on institution-building, and commercial acumen and technical support in the re-building of Libya’s infrastructure, including its tourism industry. The measure of Malta’s success in this enterprise will lie in striking the right balance between active and hard-nosed support for the newly-free Libyan people, and strict non-involvement in its internal politics or the politics of the region.